Shadow:
The Scavenger Trilogy, Book Oneby
KJ Parker(Orbit,
£6.99, 572 pages, paperback, published 30 May 2002; first published
2001.)

This story starts with
a man lying in mud and blood, half in and half out of a small river,
surrounded by corpses and, thanks to a knock on the head, missing his
memory. Acting on instinct, cautious to a fault, and with absolutely
no sense of direction or intention, he makes his way as best he can
into the brush. His prospects don't look good, and indeed, they aren't.

The protagonist lurches from one minor calamity to another, with a
fair number of major calamities mixed in for seasoning. All he wants
is peace, quiet, and some hint as to who he is. But almost every encounter
ends (if it doesn't begin) with violence, and though he keeps blundering
into people whose first response is "oh God, not you again!" they usually
don't live long enough to tell him anything.

Scattered hints of his past emerge in the clear yet disconnected dreams
that haunt him, and it takes time for the reader to appreciate that
these dreams don't all originate from one person's experience, but from
many. On one night he may glean a snippet from the wayward youth of
Prince Tazencius, on another participate in General Cronan's victory
over Allectus. There's a danger of confusion in this narrative method,
but Parker holds it together well, stitching together a patchwork back-story
that intrigues and puzzles in equal measure.

With few choices available, our memory-shy hero takes up with a travelling
con-artist, Copis. Copis makes her living playing the part of Priestess
to an obscure and mordant God, Poldarn, whose arrival presages the end
of the world (or at least of the Empire within which the action is taking
place). Poldarn is an undemanding role to play, and for want of other
alternatives John Doe adopts his name, but here is where the real bite
of the book lies.

Is Poldarn the amnesiac, actually Poldarn the God? The God who is,
in fact, not only presaging, but actually causing the downfall of the
Empire? There are certainly plenty of omens that suggest he is. Big,
ugly, sinister omens, and no-one does Sinister as well as Parker does.

This is not a Horror story, but it's pretty damned horrible. The Empire
is in a wretched state. The Northern territories are being savaged by
mysterious, elusive yet deadly Raiders, while Imperial Generals and
the treacherous quasi-independent House of Amathy manoeuvre for advantage
on the sidelines.

The Imperial Throne itself is shaky, the centre of a web of intrigue
and paranoia that sends assassin Sword-Monks and conspiratorial Imperial
Chaplains scuttling hither and yon, playing fast and loose with truth,
morality, and common sense, and ruthlessly chopping down anyone who
looks like they might emerge as a contender for the crown.

The cities are plagued by stultifying Guild control, and nobody, with
vanishingly few exceptions, gives a damn about anything but themselves.

Upon this dark and stormy sea, Poldarn is tossed capriciously about.
Lethal Sword-Monks dog his tracks, Raiders and Generals and vagrant
armies keep getting in his way. He may not be Poldarn the God, but there's
more than enough evidence to suggest he's Poldarn the Extremely Evil
Whom Everyone Wishes Were Dead, and that's not easy to deal with. This
is a book alive with a dark intelligence and a sardonic, almost harsh
wit. There's a dense yet meticulously logical plot around which the
alarms and disasters swirl. Parker leads his characters steadily down
a shadowy road towards oblivion. No-one wins cleanly, no-one comes out
on top (there is, one suspects, no top to come out on). Everyone blunders
at some point or another, everyone is a prey to lethal oversight, a
touch of fatigue, or some other poor bastard's sheer damned stupidity...

One finds oneself looking forward to the next two books in the sequence
with a certain horrified bated breath. Parker's previous trilogy, The
Fencer, played similar dark games with clever, ruthless characters
and remorseless, inexorable fate, but it started out on a lighter note
than this one, and gave itself over, at times, to a sly, almost playful
badinage. Shadow is starker work, enthralling, but disturbing,
and I confidently predict it will not have a happy ending.

One from the Dark Side, certainly, but excellently written, and a wonderful
tonic to much of the ersatz pap that clutters the genre.